Marina Tabassum Architects designed a house you can carry away in 3 hours

Char communities living on Bangladesh's shifting river islands face recurring flood and erosion displacement, and the land they live on can literally disappear and reappear from year to year as river channels shift. The standard humanitarian-architecture response to this kind of disaster exposure is to build sturdier, more permanent, flood-resistant housing designed to withstand the next flood in place.

That standard answer targets the wrong variable. A stronger house doesn't help a household whose actual problem isn't that their house might be damaged by a flood — it's that the ground under the house is not reliably there year to year. No amount of structural reinforcement changes the fact that these households are going to have to move, repeatedly, regardless of how well their current house survives a given flood season.

Architect Marina Tabassum designed the Khudi Bari ('little house'), a modular structure built from bamboo with chevron-braced frames and custom steel connectors, assembled by the household itself in about three days — and just as importantly, disassembled in about three hours and carried to the next site. Rather than optimizing the house for durability in a fixed location, Tabassum optimized it for cheap, fast disassembly and relocation, treating impermanence as the actual design requirement rather than a failure to be engineered around.

Designed a modular bamboo house optimized for disassembly in three hours, treating impermanence as the design requirement rather than engineering against it.

The land disappears, so a fixed house is useless regardless of strength.

Cheap bamboo and simple connectors make abandonment affordable.

Fast disassembly lets families save their home, not just belongings.

When the ground itself is unstable, optimize for relocation, not durability.

By early 2025, more than 78 Khudi Bari units had been built across char communities and had withstood multiple flood seasons, at a cost of roughly $450 per unit, making the design significantly more accessible than conventional housing alternatives. The design has since been scaled beyond individual households into larger community facilities, including women-led centres in Rohingya refugee camps, and Marina Tabassum Architects won the 2025 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the project, with the jury specifically recognizing its contribution to the wider use of bamboo as a building material.